Family members of Serafina Mardi, the gang-rape victim who committed suicide after being forced into an out-of-court settlement with the rapists in February, are in fear of a backlash from their religious leaders.

Israel believes Turkey is actively helping Iran to sidestep economic sanctions and has also turned a blind eye to Iranian weapons smuggling into Syria, according to leaked US diplomatic cables published yesterday.

Editorial

We congratulate the probe committee for completing its task in good time and handing over its report to the finance ministry. The committee has identified around 100 persons, many of them 'powerful' people, who seem to have been involved in the stock market manipulation. The enquiry, we feel, has established prima facie case against some institutions, companies and individuals of their involvement in the manipulation. The report has come down strongly on the lack of oversight and collusive role of the SEC.

The World Health Day passed off the day before yesterday with a call for informed and rational use of antibiotics. This came under the theme of the day which was “Antimicrobial resistance and its global spread”.

Sports

After much talk of this and that, Mashrafe Bin Mortaza has finally decided to stay with the team and will most likely play today's first of three ODIs against Australia at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium in Mirpur.

Wisden editor Scyld Berry's decision to drop one name from the list of Cricketers of the Year of the 2011 edition of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack has made waves across the cricket world. But the big news here is the flight that Tamim Iqbal has taken, becoming the first Bangladeshi to be part of this vaunted selection.

Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan captain, has said called on the IPL to include Pakistan players with relations between the two countries steadily improving. Pakistan played India in the World Cup semifinal in Mohali, a game watched by Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani on the invitation of his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh, who was also present.

Indian golfer Kahlin Jashi maintained a solo lead in the Runner Group 26th Bangladesh Amateur Golf Championship with eight under par at the close of the third round's play at the Kurmitola Golf Course in Cantonment yesterday.

Metropolitan

Environmental activists, development workers, cultural activists and social workers at a rally yesterday demanded effective initiatives to resolve the yearlong environmental and citizens' crises facing the city's Old Dhaka area.

Foreign Minister Dipu Moni, who is now on an official visit to Russia, spent a busy day yesterday as she met chief executives of State Atomic Energy Corporation 'Rosatom', the largest oil and gas exploration company 'Gazprom' and members of Bangladesh community in Moscow.

Although Bangladesh bears no relation with the recent devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the country is highly vulnerable to tremors due to its geological structure, tectonic set-up and geographical location.

Leaders of Bangladesh Diabetic Society demanded the government to award the late Dr Shamsuddin Ahmed, a professor of surgery department of Sylhet MAG Osmani Medical College Hospital, with Swadhinata Padak.

International

Fasting anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare yesterday announced a 'jail bharo' (court arrest) movement across India on April 13 escalating the movement which is now been gaining support from various path of the country.

Libyan government forces tried to storm into the besieged city of Misrata yesterday as Nato generals acknowledged their air power was not enough to help insurgents remove Muammar Gaddafi by force alone.

Ivory Coast's UN-recognised president Alassane Ouattara enforced a blockade yesterday around his rival Laurent Gbagbo's Abidjan residence, as the United Nations said it had found more than 100 bodies in the west of the country.

A gene that makes bugs highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians massed in Cairo's Tahrir Square yesterday two months after president Hosni Mubarak was ousted to demand the trial of former regime elements, slamming the military rulers for stalling on reforms.

Embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh rejected an exit plan by Gulf states trying to broker an end to bloody unrest, as tens of thousands of Yemenis turned out yesterday for pro- and anti-regime protests.

Kenyan Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and two co-defendants appeared before the International Criminal Court yesterday, to face charges of crimes against humanity during deadly post-election violence.

Arts & Entertainment

From various historical accounts, folklore and religious texts, it appears that very fine fabrics were available in Bengal as far back as the first century BCE. Once such celebrated fabric of the subcontinent is the Jamdani of Dhaka (present day Bangladesh). The Jamdani weave as we see it today is essentially a fusion of the ancient weaving techniques of Bengal which is around 2,000 years old, with the gossamer like “Muslin” produced here since the 14th century. The Jamdani weave therefore represents over two thousand years of continuous aesthetic evolution that blends different artistic influences.

An impressive array of indigenous fairy tales consisting of exotic characters ranging from frogs and talking birds to kings, queens and demons, is collectively known as “Thakurma'r Jhuli”. These stories, popular in Bengal, from time immemorial were collected by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar. From the seemingly uncountable stories, Titto Ridwan had picked up “Shonar Chul” [Golden Hair] and “Jadur Hari” [Magic Pot] to base his drama serial on.

OP-ED

Cynics say that the anti-corruption campaign has lost much of its steam and its prime mover, the Anti-Corruption Commission is fighting a losing battle. Some go even further and make derisive comments on the appeal of the Commission's chairman to wage a crusade against the scourge of corruption. These are facts of our body politic and we have to grapple with them, maybe for a painfully long time.

I am not surprised over the Wikileaks disclosure that Pakistan Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani stood in the way of a settlement between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. According to the US diplomatic cables, the deck had been cleared for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Zardari to sign a deal but Kayani was the "remaining obstacle."

With the trial of war criminals in the offing, those now in their 30s and above must know the full background of the liberation war, especially the calculated genocide that was launched by the Pakistani occupation forces from the night of March 25, 1971, which continued for nine months.

Institutions and organisations come up to meet new challenges of time. The International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), founded in 1863, is an organisation that brings succor to the wounded, and provides protection and assistance to victims of armed conflicts and strife. Its visionary founder Henry Dunant and the Red Cross were the joint recipients of the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, the year it was introduced.

Environment

It is now widely recognised that the coastal regions of the world would suffer severely both in economic and social fronts from the direct impact of global warming and rising sea level. It has been noticed that in recent years sea-level rise, frequent storms and cyclones, and riverbank erosion have taken a serious turn in the coastal regions of the Bay of Bengal. These necessitate checking up vulnerability of the coastal people. In particular, investigation on the livelihood in terms of socio-economic vulnerability (risk) of the coastal population is of paramount importance. Two initiatives are urgent: one, investigating the types of adaptation measures available to overcome the economic and social devastation from frequent and extreme climatic hazards locally and nationally; two, measuring the socio-economic vulnerability of the frontline coastal regions for policy purposes.

Advances in climate change modeling enable us to obtain best estimates of temperature, rainfall, and sea level and their likely uncertainty ranges given a projected warming with different emission scenarios. Results for different emission scenarios are provided explicitly in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) report. Projected global average surface warming for the end of the 21st century (20902099) relative to 19801999 with best estimates and likely ranges for global average surface air warming for six Special Reports on Emission Scenarios (SRES) are shown in Table 1. The model-based projections of global average sea level rise at the end of the 21st century (20902099) are also shown in Table 1.

Britain is going all the way out to make sure that the London Olympics next year becomes a memorable part of history. Nothing has been left untouched, everything has been touched --- for people to go back home, once the Games are over, with the feeling that London is a place which keeps reinventing itself. That is not, if you think about it, unusual. Quite a few centuries ago, it was Samuel Johnson who pronounced the unambiguous judgement that one who is tired of London is tired of life. London 2012 does not promise to be tiring, or tiresome, at all. You have to look at merely one of the many aspects of the Olympics preparations to comprehend conditions as they happen to be a year prior to the commencement of the Games.

Literature

Okay, beautiful! Now I have to cross the road, the thing I hate to do. I don't know if they have a specific medical term for the fear of crossing roads. They should have one. If they can have a name for the fear of spider (arachnophobia ), why can't mine get a name, too? Crossophobia- the fear of crossing the road! Nice! Or it can be “roadophobia”, right? Anyways, the green signal is on for walking. Like a very smart raccoon, I carefully looked at my right and left and crossed the road with other people. But do raccoons follow the traffic signals? No, they just jaywalk, because they are little furry animals and not humans. Maybe I have too much coffee in my system and now high on caffeine and thinking of how the traffic signal system works in raccoon society.

The sickening light of the old lantern is disrupted by the gust of the stirring wind blown from the horizon. Then the dark lingering in the background invades. A breath of air emanating from the trees and their outer coatings has assumed the form of pent-up thoughts. The sky looks grave tonight. The moon has vanished without a trace. Latif stares over the marauding wall of darkness leaning on the damp courtyard. He cannot spot the faces squatting before him. He wonders if they are humans or just a cluster of warped shadows. How these devils have poked in at the right time as if snuffling about in the air! When he got down from the launch this morning, no one showed up. He himself had to carry the entire luggage heavy with bottles and glasses inside. How shameful, he had thought, to carry all those loads before his Dhakaite pals! Where were they hiding at that time? Having arrived Mia Bari he had to holler at Abdul to reassert himself-'You faithless thugs! I had to carry all the bags. Then why do we feed so many servants?'

Fibromyalgia is a disorder characterised by widespread muscle and bone pain and a heightened and painful response to pressure. Researchers believe that fibromyalgia amplifies painful sensations by affecting the way your brain processes pain signals.

Physiotherapy, an useful part of modern treatment are not getting proper recognition as it deserves and ignored in many ways. The subject has not yet been included in the recent proposed national health policy, according to the source of Bangladesh Physiotherapy Society (BPS).

Even if your back feels well at the moment, you may be straining it if you have poor posture, perform awkward movements, are out of shape, or get overweight. Good body mechanics include reducing strain on your back when you lift heavy loads. The Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma offers these suggestions:

University of Edinburgh scientists have found that there is a link between stress and memory loss as the stress hormone impairs memory to a great extent. Earlier studies have shown that older people with poor memory showed shrinkage of the hippocampus, region in the brain which is involved with memory; such people also had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

New research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has revealed that a specially customised pulse oximeter machine attached to the finger can be used to detect changes in heart and vessel function while you sleep, and also identify patients at increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Strategic Issues

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. The poem is fundamental component to the modern Western canon. Now that odyssey is the code name of the latest US military operation in Libya-Odyssey Dawn. The present word odyssey is very much linked to the mythical hero Odysseus. International Relations, more specifically Strategic Studies, never got such a similar literary taste or dimension before this. The US may be assuming its operation in Libya is going to be a prolonged and protracted, one with hardship and tough resistance ahead. It is almost like a ten years long journey, which once was carried out by Odysseus way back to 8th century BC to get back to his beloved family after returning from Trojan War. Is Libya aggression going to be another "Odyssey journey" for the US and thus for other European partners?

If the US changing the rules of the nuclear world order for facilitating a civilian nuclear deal with India was a case of global hegemony in action, then China's recent success in getting the Americans to acquiesce to a Sino-Pak civilian nuclear deal is the equivalent of a successful insurgent action.

Star Books Review

At first glance, the rather imposing title Women and Militancy: South Asian Complexities might conjure up in the reader visions of profound insights into what apparently should be a very interesting topic, possibly unusual in the field of academia: a correlation between women and militancy (notwithstanding the celebrated cases of Leila Khaled, Djamila Bouhired, Djamila Boupacha et al!). And, when the subtitle is considered, the reader's interest might get aroused even more, especially if s/he is of this region or has more than a passing curiosity in it. In the event, his/her experience would likely fall below expectations, more so because South Asia is limited to Bangladesh and only stretched beyond its territorial boundaries to include the proximate Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya. Beyond the rather misleading subtitle, Amena Mohsin and Imtiaz Ahmed's edited volume, as is not unusual in books made up of a collection of writings, is constituted of essays of uneven quality. A few illuminate, others are rather humdrum, and disappoint in the context of the subject matters they deal with. In the end, in some cases, one would have to look really hard to find any complexity, and the expectancy that could well be aroused by a glance at the title Woman and Militancy might turn out to be a damp squib.

The book is an excellent personal account of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh by Dr Nurun Nabi. It offers a remarkable first-hand view of the freedom struggle from the author's personal experiences as a freedom fighter. The book distinguishes itself from other works by providing a vast canvas ranging from the author's early childhood days to his participation in the freedom struggle.

Edward Kennedy's death more than a year ago was cause for the celebration, in a manner of speaking, of a dynasty that yet exercises a hold on the public imagination. It does not really matter that the dynasty, as it used to be, does not happen to be there any more. That the mystique of the Kennedys has become frayed over the years is no more in question. But, again, there is that certain reawakening of sensibilities, of memories, every time the Kennedys are mentioned. That explains the grandeur of Edward Kennedy's funeral. The fact that he was the only Kennedy brother to survive to ripe old age (he was seventy seven when he passed on) did little to stop the flow of a revival of popular interest in the clan. The Obamas and the Clintons and the Bushes and the Carters made sure, through their presence at Kennedy's memorial services in Boston, that the clan was remembered.